Jem and Tessa in the New Millennium
by ashesandhoney
Summary: A collection of my fluffy little shorts featuring Jem and Tessa after the epilogue. This update (Ch.7) is pure Christmas fluff and it makes me happy.
1. Traffic and Airports

_AN: This is actually an excerpt from a longer work that includes far too much sex for the post guidelines at FF but it can be found by following the links in my profile if you want the sexier version (the entire thing is called First Three Days and this is actually its Chapter 7 - which is why this doesn't actually explain why they've got the violin with them and need to stop to drop it off someplace safe)_

_A second note: I am going to upload these posts backwards so this in now Chapter 1 though it is the most recent addition to this story. _

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><p><strong>Traffic and Airports<strong>

Set soon after their reunion, Jem and Tessa take a plane ride

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><p>They didn't go back to London. On the drive back into the city center, trapped in a snarl of London traffic, Tessa had turned to him with an invitation in her eyes. It wasn't sex but the look wasn't far off from the way she looked at him when she suggested something that involved taking their clothing off. A little challenging, a little mischievous.<p>

"The car rental has a drop off point at Heathrow," she said.

"That's miles from your apartment," he said.

"And yet, very close to the airplanes," she said.

"You want to go to Thailand right now?" he asked.

"Not necessarily. I want to go see what they've got on offer," she said. "Last minute seats are often sold very cheap. If you didn't care where you ended up you could go anywhere. We'll need to forge you a passport but that isn't hard."

"You want to go and get on a plane?" he asked.

"Any plane," she had been looking at him with her head tilted back against the headrest but the traffic was moving again and she turned her attention back to the road. "We'll need to take the next exit. You've got about three hours to decide if the cars keep on at this pace."

"Let's go. Anywhere and everywhere," he said grinning as the exasperation climbed into her voice. He waited until they stopped again and then grabbed a fistful of her sweater and pulled her towards him and kissed her temple. She laughed and he released her as the brake lights let up again and the traffic crawled forward.

His world had been so small for so long and suddenly everything he'd never seen was laid out at his feet. They could go anywhere. Anywhere. They could see cities that he had been to countless times but had never truly seen. They could go sit in the middle of the rain forest if they wanted to. They could eat food they'd never seen and learn how to ask for directions in languages they didn't speak. Anywhere and everywhere was a very big place.

"Will you come back to Shanghai with me?" he asked.

"I will but it's different," she said.

"I know," he said. "I want to go to LA as well, before we go too far."

"I've got a house there," she said. "I got it back in the 80s before the Circle but until the uprising it was where I spent most of my time. The Blackthorns have those two half-faerie children and I didn't want them to have no one there to help if the Circle decided to come after them. They never made it that far across the continent but I worried for a long time."

"You heard what happened?" he asked.

Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel as they inched forward again. She nodded but didn't say anything else. She wasn't close to many of her descendants but Jem knew she could draw the entire family tree without missing a single distant great-great-great anything. He suspected she could do most of the Fairchild and Lightwood family trees as well. He knew that he could.

"Have you met Jace yet?" he asked. They'd talked through the story, what he knew, what she did. She'd fought at Brocelind but hadn't known all the details that had happened behind the scenes. Jem knew most of it.

"Magnus tried to introduce him in Alicante after the war with Valentine was finally done. He looks so much like his father," she said and her voice wasn't happy.

"He's a hundred times the man his father is," Jem said. "You should meet him. He'll do the Herondale name proud. He already has."

"I thought he was a Lightwood," she said with a little smile that told Jem that she had paid much more attention to Jace than she was letting on.

Most of the younger members of her family had never met her. Even so, sometimes after being told by a librarian in Alicante that the book they were looking for was impossible to find, it would show up on their doorstep without a note. Others had found that their over mortgaged house had been paid off by an unnamed investor. He'd once heard one of the Blackthorns say that they'd been accepted to a difficult training program because of the excellent recommendation they'd received though they had no idea who might be recommending them. She kept her ears open and paid attention to the details.

"He can be both," Jem said. "They're his family." He left unspoken the "but so are we," he wanted to add to that. Tessa smiled at him again and he hoped that it was because she understood it.

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><p>Tessa stopped at a bank before they got to the airport and they rented a safety deposit box that they could leave the box of Will's things in without worrying about them. The banker had responded to the name Tessa Herondale with such an excessive display of politeness that Jem wanted to lean over and look at the screen to see how much money she actually had. Even with their jeans and his scarred face, they were treated the way a clerk might have treated a gentleman when the world had been younger. It was surprisingly unmodern.<p>

Jem considered the violin. He held the case in both hands as he had when he'd carried it from Shanghai to Alicante and then from Alicante to London. He didn't want to leave it in the sterile little metal box.

Irrationally, he didn't want to leave it alone. It was made of wood but if something was yours long enough it started to absorb just a little bit of your soul. Didn't Tessa's magic prove that? The violin wasn't just a thing. The banker had left them alone with the box to pack it. They stood in an empty room and she stood beside him and waited for him to come to a decision.

"I haven't even played it yet," he said.

"We don't need to leave today. We can take it to a restorer and get it reoiled and strung and whatever else it needs. You can bring it with you. We can go to Vienna and or Italy and get it done by a grand master of some sort," she said.

"We'll come back for it," he said. "Before Thailand. We'll go wherever the airplane will take us and see everything we can and we'll come back for it."

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><p>In the airport, Jem found himself reaching for senses he didn't have anymore. It was easier to be in a crowd as a Silent Brother because he had never been a part of it. Even a gathering of Silent Brothers was not truly a crowd. Each was distinct and unconnected. Tessa had left him with the passport she'd conjured up for him and their tiny amount of luggage to go and negotiate with the person at the ticket counter.<p>

The airport was substantially more complex than anything he could remember about ports or train stations. He'd traveled as a Brother for so long. He hadn't needed tickets or schedules or security checks. He had just gone where he was told.

Tessa was not just buying the ticket but choosing the location. He would go where he was told this time with none of the lingering annoyance of being just a cog in a machine. It had always been there, in the back of his so-strange Silent Brother mind that he had no choices. He'd made the choice that erased all others. The part of him who had never stopped being James Carstairs had also never really accepted that.

"Let's have cake before we get on the plane," he said pointing out a little bake shop when Tessa came back with papers in hand.

She gave him a bemused look, "Any reason?"

"Because there's no one to tell us not to," he said.

Tessa had glamoured their way through security claiming that it he did not really want the entire airport experience. Then, over cake - hers was lemon and his chocolate - she showed him the ticket and explained what the codes meant. They were going to Nice in the south of France. A short flight, they'd be there before dinner.

"Travel is so much waiting," he said later as they stood in a line with their documents in hand. He leaned his cheek against her hair then immediately pulled back. They were in a line. They were surrounded by people and he'd managed to forget it.

She put her arm through his and cuddled against him, "Anybody says anything, I'll curse them."

He put his cheek back against her hair, "You've never laid a curse in your life."

"True, but I'd do it for you," she said.

She stayed close until they got to the gate and eventually through to their seats. She pushed him into the little pair of seats first so he was sitting against the window. It was a small plane. He knew that but he'd never seen the interior of any plane so he wasn't sure what a big one would look like.

He'd been expecting it to be grander. It was a flying machine after all. Shouldn't that be impressive? But it was remarkably like the public compartments on a train. The seats weren't particularly comfortable and they seemed to have been designed with someone much shorter than he was in mind. The little window showed tarmac and little vehicles tugging carts to and fro.

"Impressed yet?" she asked.

"Not really, no," he said returning her teasing smile.

Take off was impressive.

It pushed him back against the seat. Tessa took his hand while they both pretended he wasn't fighting down some instinctual fear that ran deeper than the logic that told him people did this daily and survived. Once the plane was in the air, level and traveling at a consistent speed his fear started to morph into something almost gleeful.

"How high are we?" he asked her.

"I have no idea," she admitted, "I think the captain told us during that garbled message about seat belts."

He looked down at clouds and had a moment of vertigo before it swept away by wonder. Tessa leaned close enough that her shoulder was pressed to his and their hands were still joined. She was watching him, not the window. The sky had been gray and overcast when they'd boarded but from above it was all blue and a spun sugar white.

"Tell me you have not gotten used to this," he said as the clouds broke and they could see countryside laid out below them like an uneven patchwork quilt. She shook her head and he only glanced at her a moment before he went back to watching the world below them. Even when it got monotonous and he had no idea which country they were passing over, he didn't look away. He asked Tessa questions about air travel and where she'd been and how she chose whether to fly or to use a portal and she answered him in a soft voice, still leaning close. The plane wasn't private or intimate but it felt like it in that moment.

When they crossed the Alps, he had another moment of dizzying vertigo. The mountains spread out like a jagged carpet. They were tall enough that people could spend days walking up them, big enough that people could get lost and die on those peaks. They looked like toys from the plane's window. He relinked his fingers with Tessa's but didn't look away. He watched mountains roll by below until they disappeared below clouds again.

"We're very small. People, I mean. We're very small," he whispered to her in Mandarin before the plane began its descent.

"We're not really, the world is big but we contain as much inside us as there is around us," she told him.

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><p>He came up behind her and looped his arms around her. Another hotel room. He was starting to conjure of fantasies of a place that was theirs. A home, not just a bed and a table. He wanted to choose wallpaper and help her put up bookshelves and have a wall full of photos of people they loved. He'd seen a photo collection that covered an entire hallway once when he'd gone to see an elderly lady on her death bed. He'd walked below the smiling faces of her family as he came to give her the last rites of the Nephilim before her family said their good byes. He wanted a collection like that.<p>

She cuddled back against his chest and he breathed in the smell of her hair. He had lived for more than a century without her and in only a little more than a week she had become essential. There was no where else he wanted to be. No where else he could even imagine being. Everything narrowed down to her.

"I'm sorry for my behaviour in the station," he said and then corrected, "airport."

"Are you alright?" she asked. "I've never seen you react like that."

"I'm still not very good at having all my emotions," he said. Her hands where over his and he opened his fingers to allow hers to lace them together. He spoke into her neck, trying to keep another overreaction at bay. He was ashamed and he didn't want that feeling to take him over either. "As a Silent Brother they were distant. I didn't have to learn to control my anger or," he nuzzled her neck, "manage lustful thoughts," she laughed. It worked that feeling pushing its way up through all the others to take up residence in his thoughts. He didn't want to be angry or ashamed or sad. He wanted to lose himself in loving her.

"And you've forgotten how," she said.

"I can manage the little ones," he said. "I can manage inconveniences and most of my worries. Usually. Sometimes my worries get the better of me. Sometimes I wait days to do what I should have the first time I saw you."

She squeezed his hands a little tighter but didn't interrupt him. She was filling up all the empty spaces. The spaces in his heart and his head where the emotions would rattle around until they became hurricanes of anger or fear. It was so much better to fill them with love.

"I love you," he said, "I love you and I have missed you for so long. I've worried about you Tessa. Each time news of a terrible story filtered its way down to the Silent City I imagined something like that happening to you with no one to protect you. Shush," he said before she could interrupt him, "I know very well that you can take care of yourself. My anxieties didn't care. After Will," he waited a moment but the grief just tugged at the edges it didn't pull him under, "After Will was gone," it tugged harder but he kept speaking, "I worried about you. When that man in the airport touched you it all came back. My reasoning couldn't get out ahead of the emotions. I'm sorry."

"You have nothing to apologize for," she said.

"I came rather close to breaking his arm," Jem said.

"If you hadn't have been there, I probably would have broken his fingers pulling them off of me. I might have broken his jaw if he'd gotten any closer," she said. "He doesn't know it it but he's actually very lucky."

Jem laughed and the last of the shame evaporated. The grief was still there, tugging at his heart but it always was. Tessa leaned her head back against his shoulder and looked at him.

"It's wonderful to have you there to protect me," she said.

"Even if you don't need it?" he asked.

"Especially because I don't need it. People protect the defenseless out of honour. You don't need to protect me, you do it because you care," she said. "I'd do the same for you, if you ever needed it."

"You protect me from all the things that I can't fight. I think that matters even more," he said and turned her to kiss her deeply.


	2. New Books

**New Books**

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><p>Tessa has warlock friends who send her books that then need to be sorted and catalogued. Jem can't imagine how she manages to keep that many books in an apartment. Her book storage system is rather more complicated than you might think.<p>

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><p>Jem Carstairs woke in an empty bed. That in itself was unusual but as he lay in the nest of blankets and looked up at the ceiling he heard a noise. He pushed himself up on his elbows and listened again. Rustling and thumping from the other room. He kicked off the blankets and climbed out of bed. The curtains were partially open because she couldn't get up without looking out at the view. The ceilings in this part of the apartment were twelve feet and the window filled most of that on the exterior wall. He pushed back the heavy green drapery and looked down at the city.<p>

It was a Tuesday and the streets far below were filled with early morning traffic. New York's commuters and yellow taxi cabs vying for space. They were high enough and the glass was thick enough that he couldn't hear a sound. The sound and fury of the city was one of his favourite things about this apartment. Tessa had a surprisingly large collection of real estate scattered around the world from a cottage on the Welsh coast and a London Townhouse to a little house in hills behind LA and a place in a hyper modern Shanghai apartment complex. She'd mentioned Florence and Prague and Cairo but they hadn't made it there yet.

The bedroom and the main sitting room in this apartment were sunken in order to allow for those huge windows and he had to climb the stairs to get to the main hallway. He didn't bother with slippers or a shirt, he couldn't hear voices. The hallway led along to a large open space. On the upper side was a huge kitchen with a dining area and below that was a sitting room that had quickly become his favourite place on the planet. It smelled like coffee and lavender and cedar. He leaned on the railing separating the two and looked down at the chaos.

"What happened here?" he asked.

Tessa was sitting in the middle of one of the two couches with a huge cardboard box on the coffee table in front of her. The furniture was the source of the cedar smell and the huge coffee table with its uneven edges was usually stacked with books but not this many.

"Nat sent me a box," she said.

"Nat?" he asked. He had to cross to the front door to get to the stairs down into the room. He could have made the jump but it would had disturbed the piles of books and that was dangerous when she was focused like this. It looked like a jumble but it was probably well planned. The pile on the table meant something different from the pile on the sofa beside her, which meant something different from the pile on the floor at her feet.

"Natasha," she said. "We trained together in Eastern Europe. She had just discovered that immortality was part of the package deal with the day-glo hair and horns. She needed a mentor, I needed someone to practice with. I'll introduce you the next time she's on the continent. She finds the best spell books. There are some spell books in Moscow that you'd never find anywhere else. There are entire shops and libraries full of them."

"So that's a box of spell books," he said.

"Among other things. Nat sends anything she thinks I'll like," Tessa said. He skirted the piles to come and stand beside her and she finally looked up at him instead of the cover of the huge leather bound book in her hands. She grinned at him like his being there was the best surprise imaginable. He returned the smile and leaned down to pull her face up for a kiss. Her hair was down making a wild curtain around her face and he pushed his fingers back through it.

"You really are beautiful," he said.

"As are you, gorgeous," she said with a laugh. He pulled away from her and picked up one of the piles and shifted it further down the couch so he could sit beside her. She was wearing a yellow tank top and a pair of white cotton shorts and his Victorian sensibilities were briefly shocked by the sheer amount of skin he could see. The shirt was riding up a little bit so he could see a strip of her lower back when she leaned forward to put down the book. He leaned close and looked over the box in front of her. She shifted just a bit so that she could lean her shoulder against his, skin to skin and he smiled at her.

"Do you read Cyrillic?" he asked reaching into the box to pull out a paper back.

"God no, Nat thinks if she keeps sending me books that I'll eventually learn. I can't even speak Russian, let alone read it. I don't even know if this is Russian or Ukrainian or something else entirely," she said looking at the book in his hand.

"What do you do with them?" he asked.

"Sort them and then put them away," she said.

"Where?" he asked waving a hand at the book shelf. The book shelf covered the full twelve foot space and ran from railing to window, over ten feet wide. It had books squeezed in on top or double shelved where they were small enough. It was huge and had no more space for the piles that surrounded them. It looked like the overstuffed bookshelves he remembered from Will's room.

"Here and there," she said with a smile.

"Tell me," he said nudging her shoulder and she shoved him back laughing.

"The ones I don't want go to a used book shop down in Greenwich. The ones in languages I can't speak go to an immigrant welcome center in the Bronx. They've been open since the 1940s. There are staff there who remember my mother," she said.

"Your mother?" he said. "Oh, your mother of course and you look so much like she did at your age."

"Well yes, they don't know my real mother," she said. "Some of the spell books I'll hang onto here. That's that pile on the table beside the box. The pile on the floor is spell books to go into storage, either things I don't want right now or stuff I've already got copies of. The pile there," she leaned across him to pat the pile that he had moved and then slid back, "That's fiction and poetry that I want to read." He loved the little ways that she would touch him.

"Doesn't fix the space problem," he said.

"I have lots of places to leave books," she said.

"In all the apartments," he asked.

"No, I mean there are some in the apartments. I've got a collection like this in London too but mostly they're in the magic libraries," she said with a laugh. "And all the spell books go to a huge flat I have in Prague. It's got four bedrooms and it is all spell books, rooms of them. It's a library in and of itself. I lend them out even."

"Wait, magic libraries? Should I know what a magic library is?" he asked.

"The magic libraries are famous. They're like shadowhunter folklore," she looked at him expectantly, "No? The story is this, a long time ago, I asked Cece if I could leave some books at Ravenscar Manor. Her parents left it to her and it's still in the Lightwood family. It's actually the only piece of property that they still hold in England, the Clave took everything else after the debacle with the Circle. Ravenscar's ownership is murky and they were too busy to untangle it. They call it the magic library because things just appear. I know that Alec has heard the stories. When a great uncle became Inquisitor an entire new set of Shadowhunter Law books appeared in the library and no one in the family had bought them. Things appear and disappear. The books sometimes rearrange themselves. The younger kids think it's all stories," she said.

"And it's you," he said.

"Well, they won't all fit here," she said. "The Herondale house in Idris is the other one. They've got more fiction though because it started as Will's collection. We used to send books there when we were traveling. It was some of the first magic I ever learned how to do. A lot of the Ravenscar books are useful ones. They have a beautiful collection of collected faerie tales from around the world. It's one of my favourites. I think it took 10 years to collect them all. There were a few at Lucie's for awhile too but the Blackthorns sold the house and donated 90% of them sometime around the end of the second world war."

"You hide books in Shadowhunter libraries," he said with a laugh. "That sounds like Will's idea."

"Sending books back was his idea. I wonder what he'd think if he knew I was still doing it," she said tossing a paper back onto a pile destined for the donation bin.

"He'd love that you were still doing it. He'd probably want a list of everything you'd ever sent so he could make a reading list out of it," Jem said. "He'd love magic libraries with new books hidden in them."

"It's not so much hiding and I had permission. Besides it's pretty obvious. Sometimes I just leave them on tables," she argued and handed him a book "Put that one with the other ones beside you."

"You had permission a hundred years ago," he said.

"Permission is permission. Though, I sometimes imagine Robert Lightwood tearing up the carpet in the library finding the summoning circle carved into the floor and having a fit. I can't decide if it would be hilarious or terrifying," she said.

"You carved it into the floor? Why?" he asked.

"That's how I get the books in and out. Chalked circles rub off. There are circles in both libraries, the shelves are marked and my books all have a mark in them too. I can call them to me or send them there," she said. "Cecily helped me lay it down and Will helped with the Herondale one. I could probably do it without the circles now but I wasn't that good at magic back then so I needed the circles to make it work. They still help, it's easier."

She laughed at the look he gave her and slid forward to the edge of the couch to dig into the depths of the box. He was impressed and surprised and wondered how big that collection of books would be if they were ever in one place. He readjusted and slid in to sit behind her. He had to half lift her with an arm around her waist in order to get her settled against him. She moved easily, matching her movements to his until they were cuddled together. He held her as she continued digging through her piles just enjoying having her this close.

She would twisted around and show him things: a leather bound collection of TS Eliot poems, spell book that specialized in healing spells, a collection of oral histories about vampires in the Balkans. She pulled out a stack of Russian poets in translation and flipped though them slowly. Her knee was tossed over his as she read him a few lines of a poem by Innokénty Ánnensky about a violin.

'How deep and dark the delirium!

How clouded the moonlit heights!

To have touched the violin so long

yet not know the strings in the light!

"So many sad poets," he said.

"So many happy ones too," she said. "I don't know if you can be truly happy until you've been sad."

"Are you happy?" he asked.

"Right now?" she said

"Yes," he said.

"Right now, I can't imagine being happier than this," she said.

"Me neither," he said and leaned in to kiss the side of her neck as she nestled into him, the book still in her hand.


	3. Rain on a Paris Street

**Rain in Paris**

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><p>Jem and Tessa get caught in the rain. This is utter fluff. I imagine that after leaving the Silent Brothers, Jem has moments where his emotions just crash through him and are almost uncontrollable. This is a moment like that.<p>

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><p>It was overcast in Paris. Sunlight fought its way through the heavy gray sky in intermittent bursts of radiance before it was smothered by the clouds again. Tessa stepped out of a stall into one of these radiant little patches of light with a smile on her face. She had two new books, old leather bound copies of things she'd read before but they had been too beautiful to leave sitting on that dusty table. She held the little plastic bag to her chest and scanned the crowd.<p>

She found what she was looking for a few stalls down. She'd missed him because he had his head bowed over something on a table. The stall had a big awning up to shade it's merchandise from the nonexistent sunlight. When Jem saw her coming he ducked out from under it, standing to his full height and smiling at her. He wore a t-shirt and jeans and if he hadn't had runes over his cheeks and if he hadn't been startlingly beautiful, he might have looked like just a normal boy. Maybe a college student on exchange or a local who worked nearby. A girl walking by stopped and looked at him twice but he didn't notice her. He never noticed. She had started pointing it out to him.

"Books?" he asked. "That's a silly question, of course it's books."

She laughed and leaned in close to him to see what he had been so engrossed in. It was an antique set of throwing knives in a dark wooden case. Her shoulder brushed his as she looked in at the rest of the weaponry. Most of it was decorative, things you wouldn't want to have to defend your life with but there was a scimitar hanging on a wall that was so beautiful she considered buying it just of the sake of the artistry.

Jem distracted her, pressing a kiss to her shoulder just beside the strap of the yellow sundress she had worn in defiance of the weather forecast. She tried not to grin too stupidly when she turned to look at him. He stood beside her looking quite civilized, with his dark hair hanging just a little into his eyes which lit up with mischief. She brushed his hair back with her fingers just as an excuse to touch him.

"I shouldn't buy these," he said. "They're beautiful but they're old and probably not any good for actually throwing."

"I don't know, sometimes old things are so much better," Tessa said bumping her shoulder against him. She wasn't looking at the knives when she added, "And they are beautiful."

Jem decided that was a good enough reason to buy a box of very expensive knives. He took her books and dropped them into the larger bag he'd been given and threw the whole thing over one shoulder. He reached out and laced his fingers with hers as they headed deeper into the warren of stalls. Some held antiques but others just sold bags or souvenirs. Tessa stopped to run her hands over textiles and Jem stopped to flip over snowglobes and watch the glitter rain down on the Eiffel Tour. By the time they broke through the other side of the market, on their way for coffee at a cafe, the sun had lost the battle with the overcast sky.

"Look's like rain," Tessa said just before the first drops started to fall. Jem tilted his face up and the drops splashed across his nose and the runes on his cheeks. There was a brief moment where it was just falling droplets and then the heavens opened. There was calling and rustling as everyone ran for cover. Jem stood frozen in the downpour for a moment before he shook wet hair out of his eyes and laughed. Tessa's hair was sticking to her shoulders and her dress was already getting wet enough to cling to her skin but she stayed where she was, held in place by the force of his delight.

He was incredible when he was like this. Joy lit him up and his smile shone like a spotlight on a stage. She couldn't imagine wanting to step out of it. She smiled back at him, baffled but thrilled to be a part of this moment. He leaned in and kissed her, his hand curving around her neck to pull her close. She could still feel the smile through the kiss which tasted of rain water and something sweeter. He pulled away from her lips and leaned their heads together, water ran down his eye lashes and off the tip of her nose. He laughed very softly.

Then as fast as the downpour had come on them, it petered out. The rain went from warm, drenching sheets of water to fat droplets that splashed in the puddles gathered on the cobblestones and then it was gone. Tessa still stood transfixed. The sun clawed its way back out from behind the clouds. They stood dripping, in a patch of bright yellow light that wasn't half as bright as his smile.

For a brief moment the square outside that market was theirs. The crowds had been driven below awnings and into shops by the storm. They were only two people, a tall man in a t-shirt that had molded itself to the muscles of his back and a willowy girl in a dripping dress but for that brief moment they were all that existed.

Jem kissed her again before the crowd moved back in around them and they had to rejoin the rest of the world. He took her hand again and pulled her on towards the cafe. They rejoined the crowd as though they hadn't just been interrupted by a moment of stunning joy and pouring rain.


	4. Sing With Me

**Sing With Me**

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><p>Tessa Gray sings along to the radio. A habit that Jem thinks is adorable and needs to be encouraged.<p>

* * *

><p>The 21st century was soaked in music. The world had a soundtrack that played out of car radios and over the PA systems in stores. It was profoundly distracting to Jem who couldn't ignore it the way that everyone else did. He paid attention to music and found himself thinking about the store's musical selections instead of the grocery shopping. But radios and ipods and speaker systems mean that music was always available and he loved that. There was a radio in the kitchen of their apartment. A battered thing with all the buttons labeled in Russian but it worked. Tess would flick it on, choosing stations seemingly at random, when she did housework.<p>

Then she sang along.

One of his favourite discoveries since they'd been married was that she could sing. Not well, not really and she only sang along to the radio but she sang. Her taste swung wildly. He couldn't figure out what the common thread was that connected the things she liked. She sang the way she read, widely and a little erratically but with passion.

She sang along to Queen and David Bowie. She loved Marvin Gaye and the Supremes. She turned Beyonce up, much to his chagrin. She knew all the words to nearly everything by the Beatles and she danced to Buddy Holly. She liked songs with too many words. Poetry set to music. Poetry set to sound at least, Jem wasn't always convinced music was the best label for some of it. She didn't seem to care if the melodies were repetitive or the rhythms simplistic. And for all that, music that he found grating was suddenly charming because she was singing along. She spun around the kitchen, a wooden spoon in hand, singing about not hurrying love and he found himself adoring the song as much as the girl.

He learned Sound of Silence by Simon and Garfunkel first. He knew that she liked it and he fussed with the arrangement for days. It was one of the very few songs that was saved on her phone to be listened to on demand instead of when it popped up on the radio. He listened and he practiced when she was away. It was meant to be a surprise.

He played it for her one night when they were sitting in the living room. She had a book on her lap and her hair tied up. He sat across the room from her and watched her. It had been a cute game in the planning but now, the music flowing he realized how much he wanted it. He wanted her to say yes so badly. It took her a minute to place it and she tilted her head in a question.

"Sing with me," he said stopping in the middle of the song and lowering the violin.

"I don't sing," she said.

"You sing all the time," he said. "You're really very good."

"You're a liar," she said. "I don't make dogs howl but that is a long way from very good."

"I'm not asking for Rossini," he said. "Sing with me. I know you know the words."

She hesitated. Not saying yes but not saying no either. He stood up and came to sit down beside her so he could make his eyes wide and put his chin on her shoulder when he said, "Please?"

"I'm not good," she warned.

"You're amazing," he argued and then dropped his voice a little, "Sing with me."

That she agreed to made him laugh and bound up to regather the violin. He started the song again settling back on the couch beside her. Her nervous smile was so sweet he almost stopped playing so that he could lean in and kiss her. When he got to the part where the lyrics were meant to start he looked at her and she joined him. Her voice was quiet and tentative but sweet. Grinning while playing the violin wasn't impossible but he missed a note or two as her voice rose with a crescendo. The tentative edge started to drop away. She didn't look at him and she was blushing but she didn't stop. He kept the music soft so that he could hear her.

As the final notes died he did lean in and kiss her.

"Amazing," he repeated and she started to say something that he knew would be self deprecating so he put a finger against her lips, "Thank you, that was wonderful."

"What else do you know?" she asked him.

"I've got some Rossini, if you want to work on the high notes," he joked and she pushed him just a little, shaking her head. His voice was serious when he said, "I can learn whatever you want me to."

"You hate pop music," she accused.

"I don't hate all pop music but I hate even the terrible stuff less when you are singing it," he said. "I think I would even love that song about California Girls if you were singing it. Tell me your favourites, I can learn them."

She leaned over and kissed him and said, "Play that one again."

"Will you sing again?" he asked. They were nose to nose. He couldn't not smile at her. He couldn't remember the last time he'd made music with someone else. It might have been playing with his father in Shanghai almost a century and a half before. Through the self-consciousness, he thought maybe she was as delighted with it as he was or maybe she was just delighted with his delight.

"Play me a song James, I'll sing with you," she said.

He brought the instrument back up and sat so that he could see her. This time, as she sang the same lyrics again, she held his gaze. The music rose and fell in the room around them as she sang loud enough to be heard over the violin. It wasn't flawless, she stumbled over a lyric, he missed a key change because he was staring instead of concentrating but it was, in that moment, perfect.


	5. Shopping in London

**Shopping in London**

* * *

><p>Set in the first week or so after meeting again on the Bridge in 2008 - Jem and Tessa go for dinner and a little bit of shopping in London.<p>

* * *

><p>Dressed and bundled for winter in London they went for an early dinner at an Italian restaurant. Tessa touched him the entire time. She held his hand, fingers interlaced with his, as they walked through the late afternoon crowd. She held onto his arm in the crowded train as they took the three tube stops to get where she wanted to take him. Every time the train swung or the terrifying crowd jostled she bumped into him and they both smiled. It almost made up for their surroundings but not quite. He found himself unexpectedly claustrophobic in the train car. Enclosed with so many other people and under ground. Again. At least the London tube at four in the afternoon wasn't quiet.<p>

Emerging into the weak watery winter sunshine was a relief and the little cafe was even better. Quiet but bright and warm. Pristine white table cloths, fake brick, a little plastic flower in a tiny vase. It wasn't high end but the food was wonderful. He chose pizza. It arrived and Tessa waved away his knife and fork and insisting he learn to eat it like a New Yorker though they were a thousand miles from New York. It was so normal. Take a train, eat pizza, talk about geographical changes and London history. There were probably a hundred other people in the city doing exactly this.

Normal was wonderful.

And even if it hadn't been the touching didn't stop and that was wonderful. Her knee bumped his under the table. He put his hand on the table top and she lay hers over it. She leaned across the table to wipe sauce off his cheek with a thumb. It wasn't quite indecent. It would have been back when they'd been young but the waiter just smiled at them as though they were quite charming. He insisted they have dessert and Tessa chose anything with strawberries.

Walking, rather than taking the train, she leaned into him and he put an arm around her shoulder as they window shopped. It was still early and though the sun had disappeared the street was brightly lit. Post-Christmas sales dominated and there were still decorated trees and strings of faerie lights up in some shops.

He stopped suddenly. The shop he'd stopped in front of had an entire orchestra in the window.

"Have you played since you got back?" she asked him leaning her head on his shoulder and looking up at the display with him.

"No," he said. "Can we go in? Would you mind?"

"Of course not," she said.

The shop was aggressively modern and well organized. The first floor was all guitars and keyboards. A drum set that was large enough that it wouldn't all fit in Tessa's living room dominated one wall. Stands of scores and practice books. Technology touted as essential but none of it anything that Jem had ever used before. He picked up an electric tuner and turned it in his hand before putting it back on the shelf. It wasn't anywhere near what he wanted. They found strings upstairs and he smiled involuntarily at the wall of instruments. Violins and cellos and a double bass as tall as he was.

"Do you want one?" Tessa asked him.

"You say that in the same tone of voice as you used when you asked me if I wanted an ice cream bar the other day," he said.

"And?" she asked.

"This one, in the case here, is worth 2000 pounds," he said.

"I have a very good accountant who has been investing my money since the 1920s, I am embarrassingly rich. I'm rich enough I don't actually know how rich I am," she said. "I can buy you a violin. I can't buy you an antique Guarneri that your father gave you but I can buy you just a violin."

At the mention of the Guarneri Jem felt a sharp pang of longing, "Do you still have it?"

"No, James, as soon as you were out the door I popped it into a bonfire with the kindling," she said mock frowning. "Of course I still have it. It isn't here, I'm not at this apartment enough to risk keeping it there. It's in storage but we can go and get it."

Jem decided to wait. He wanted his violin more than he wanted just a violin. Although they did go find a clerk and talked her into letting him play a few of the sample instruments. Tessa bespelled the door so she wouldn't come back and try and sell it to them before they were ready.

He was rusty. His fingers weren't fast enough and he stumbled over bow positions and pulled the odd screech out with the notes. Tessa sat on one of the chairs set up at the back of the little room dedicated to the purpose of testing out the merchandise and smiled at him as he played snatches of things he could dredge out of memory. A little Vivaldi but he couldn't remember the second part of the andante and had to stop. A bit of something he remembered his father playing but couldn't place. A scale. Another. The arpeggio that went with it. Slower, faster, long notes followed by staccato bursts of sound.

When his clumsy fingers had started to remember where to find second position and how to make an A without dragging shrieks from the strings with it, he played her the song he had written her. There were things worth remembering for a century and this he had stored away. He could forget Vivaldi but he couldn't forget this. She was looking out the window in the door at some child arguing with a parent when he started. She turned back to him but didn't recognize it immediately. He could tell when she did and her expression changed into something both immeasurably happy and deeply sad. He played it all and she had tear streaks down her face when he was done. She was in his arms before he'd brought the bow down.

They bought supplies, new strings and rosen and a bow made out of some fancy material that the clerk talked him into. His own bow would need restrung and if he had a second he wouldn't have to wait for it to get back from a repair shop. He left the store with a bag in hand and a smile on his face. Playing. Even playing badly on improperly tuned sample instruments left him feeling more like himself in a way he almost couldn't articulate.


	6. Vacations and Distractions

**AN: This was actually one of the very first Jessa scenes I ever wrote. It was for a longer piece but this entire scene got cut. I loved it so it now gets to join this little collection. It is in first person and it is smut so it's a little different from the other stories I've got here.**

Vacations

We took a bridge across the canal and found a pizza place for lunch before getting lost three times trying to find the hotel that we had booked. By the time 4pm rolled around I was dead on my feet from the jet lag and the hiking but I was happy. Jem stopped to look at everything and we had sat on a fountain in one of the smaller squares and just watched the crowds wander by. Organized tours with sign toting tour guides mingled with families trying to keep an eye on multiple children at once. Locals were easy to pick out, they skirted the crowds and moved deftly through the throngs that stopped in the middle of bridges or in front of glass shops. They didn't look as surly as New Yorkers faced with the hordes of summer visitors.

"You could unpack my stuff for me," I told Jem when we had settled into the hotel. I am a warlock and we had opted to leave the luggage and use magic to summon it later. The bags appeared in the room and I'd tossed one on the second bed and flipped it open.

"How much of it is books?" he asked.

"None," I said.

"Who are you and what did you do with Tessa?" he asked and I looked up from a pair of shoes that I had picked out of the bag because they were more comfortable than what I was wearing. He looked sincerely incredulous. I grabbed the nearest item in the bag and threw it at him in mock annoyance.

"I got a kindle, look at me in the 21st century," I told him and held up the device and waggled it. I started to say something else but when I looked up he had a bra draped across his shoulder and my comment dissolved into giggles. He looked at me with a smile crawling across his face. He was trying so hard not to laugh but that just made me laugh harder. He looked ridiculous in a blue button down with the bit of lace hanging off of him at an odd angle.

I grabbed another piece of clothing from the bag and threw it too, it was just a t-shirt but this time he retaliated. He is one of those people who seems still and slow, like everything he does is measured and considered.

He is not slow.

I tried to duck out of the way as he launched himself over the bed at me but he caught me around the waist and spun me around. I was laughing again until he backed me into a wall and I could feel his body against mine. My laughter faded into something else as a warmth spread out across my skin. I looked up at him and tried to bite back the smile, sucking my lower lip between my teeth. Pretending to be serious while your body lights up is difficult.

"Why are you throwing lingerie at me?" he asked. His voice was low but the humour was still there. It was like laughter was a current that ran through him all the time if you only listened for it. I knew it wasn't that simple, that there was darkness there too but I loved this little rumble of laughter so much it hurt a little bit.

"You're making fun of me," I told him in a voice that was supposed to be matter of fact but it was far too breathy for that.

"You're funny," he said.

"Am I?" I asked.

"You also smell good," he was even closer now, his breath against my neck and collar bone.

"Liar, I smell like airport and the garlic from that restaurant," I said.

"Which shouldn't smell good and yet," he said pressing his lips against that little hollow behind my ear. I tilted my head back and slid my fingers through his hair to pull him closer.

By the time I remembered that the world was bigger than the space between us, I was drastically late for my meeting with Natasha.

He pulled away from the trail he was kissing down my neck and leaned his forehead against mine so that I was staring into his eyes. My hands had found their way to his shoulders and I slid them up to cup his neck and make sure he didn't go anywhere. We stood like that for a long moment. Face to face, breath to breath, bodies pressed together but still.

"I keep thinking I'll get used to you," he said.

"Used to me?" I repeated.

"Every time you look at me, it's like a miracle," he said. "It's like everything I've ever wanted and everything I never thought I'd be able to have. It's all that every time I see you. When you told that woman on the boat about our honeymoon it was a miracle that you married me. When you decided to come here it was a miracle that you invited me along. When you look at me like that your eyes are a miracle."

"Funny," I said in the same low tone he had used, matching my voice to his, "I always thought you were my miracle, not the other way around."

"That's why it's miraculous," he said, his fingers tracing patterns on my skin.

"We're abusing that poor word," I said.

"What should we do instead?" he asked and he shifted his hips against me in a way that made my eyes flutter shut.

"Scrabble?" I said. He looked at me with confusion and then surprise, the word had come out in a tone that couldn't really be described as anything but erotic and it took him a minute to process what I'd said.

He doubled over laughing and pushed away from me.

"What is scrabble?" he asked.

"A board game, good for vocabulary," I said.

"You want to play a board game?" he asked grinning at me.

"No, you stupid, beautiful creature," I said and he gave me a look that was all mock offense but his eyes were dark again and trained on me as I walked toward him. I moved slowly and started on the buttons on my blouse. His eyes tracked my hands and by the time I was standing in front of him with by shirt untucked and falling open his smile had changed again. It was all desire, in every line.

His hands slid into the empty space and around my waist, skin on skin. I found the hem of his t-shirt and pushed it up so that my hands traveled up his stomach as his traced their way up my spine. He let go long enough to let me pull his shirt over his head and toss it onto the floor. Mine joined it before he grabbed me around the waist and picked me up. He spun me around and dropped me back on the bed. I heard the luggage hit the floor and hoped no one was below us to get mad about the impact.

The beds were soft and I sunk back into it under his weight. He settled against me so I was pinned. His hips kept mine in place and I'd spread my knees at some point which had pushed my skirt well up my thighs. It was a vulnerable position that reminded me that he was both bigger and stronger than I was. For all that, I felt nothing so strongly as that I had come home.

He stroked my face and I leaned in to kiss his neck. My lips started on his chest over his heart and his skin was salty from sweating in the sun earlier today. I ran my tongue along his collar bone and kissed the gray mark on the side of his throat, a tiny ritual between us but one we never discussed and never missed.

I grazed my teeth gently on his ear lobe because I knew it always got a reaction. In response he shivered against me and grabbed my face to pull me into a kiss that I felt in my stomach and my finger tips. I could feel him through his clothes as he pressed harder into me. There wasn't any space but I needed him closer. He'd have to let me up if we were going to get the rest of our clothing off. I pushed against his left shoulder and he caught my meaning immediately. His arms wrapped around my waist to keep me steady and close as he rolled onto his back without breaking the kiss. Our bodies could have entire conversations without ever saying a word.

I sat up on him, readjusting my position so that I was straddling his thighs not his waist. He stopped moving except for his fingers, stroking little patterns against my legs, just above my knees. I undid his belt and pushed the pants lower. His hands were flat against my thighs, invisible to me below my skirt as I sat up enough to push the pants out of the way.

His hands slid to the inside of my thighs as his body moved below me so that my knees were on either side of his stomach and his hands could reach me more easily.

"Stay up, like that," he said to me when I started to move to close the gap. I felt his hands tighten on the skin between my legs, the same sentence in a language of skin instead of words. I sat up a little straighter but slid my knees a little wider bringing my body closer to his though not quite touching. His hands were in my way, keeping me where he wanted me.

I started to say something to him but it was lost when his thumb brushed against that spot where my thighs met and my head rolled back. I resisted the urge to squirm closer to him, pressure from his hands reminding me what he'd asked for. He was gentle to the point of teasing and when I looked down at him he was smiling at me.

"You make me crazy," I told him and my voice rasped out as he added just a little more pressure through that little piece of cotton between us.

"I know," he said. "I'm going to roll you over again."

The man has a physicality and a sense of how to move that I know comes from years of combat training. Encyclopedic knowledge of hand to hand combat made him fluid in bed. His hips lifted to push me off balance and with one hand hooked under my thigh and another one on my waist, he rolled me onto my back in a single motion. I hit the bed gently but I let out a gasp that had more to do with him than the impact. I had never said it to him but I loved it when he did this, when he took the lead. Dominant but never domineering.

He'd rearranged my knees so that I was laid out below him before I'd sucked in my next breath. I licked my lips and tried to calm my breathing back to a normal speed. He waited until I looked up at him. We stared each other down. His chest was broad, bearing marks and scars of a long, long lifetime across pale skin. His hand on my thigh was a darker colour but had that same strength to it, muscles and scars but he was gentle.

"What are you planning, Carstairs?" I asked.

"All kinds of things," he said. "Any requests?"

"Anything you want," I said.

"What if I want to do something horrible?" he asked.

"You wouldn't do anything horrible to me," I said and I knew it was true. The smile he gave me sealed it as a promise. His fingers were playing up and down my thighs as he watched me.

"You're self control is terrifying," I told him. I felt mine fraying. He was too far away, those fingers weren't enough. They danced from the little space behind my knee up to the hollow at the top of my thigh but no higher. His smile was a challenge as he shifted and ran a hand up the other leg following the same path.

And my self control was gone. I shifted my hips and tried to slide closer to him as a sound that was best described as wanton moan escaped my mouth. He chuckled and his free hand slid up my stomach to hold me in place. The feel of his hand on my skin didn't calm me much but it did keep me in place. He wasn't really holding me, there wasn't that much pressure and he didn't have enough leverage to keep me down at this angle if I really wanted to move. It was more of a request that I tried to scrape enough self control back together to honour.

He held me still for a moment longer than I would have liked but he never broke eye contact. Though my breaths were panting and my heart was racing, I stayed. Then that hand on my stomach that was driving me mad by inches moved slowly to my hip and he pulled the skirt and everything below it off. I pushed my hips up to help him get rid of it and then I was naked except for the bra.

His body sliding up mine was like a breath of air after drowning. He lay beside me, a hand still on my inner thigh to keep my knees wide but I could feel his chest down the side of my body and I wrapped my near arm around his neck to pull him in for a kiss that I needed like a body needed air. As his lips touched mine, his fingers slid into me. His mouth swallowed the gasp that escaped from mine and kissed me harder.

My hand on his face. His arm under my back. My bra gone. His mouth lower and lower until I felt the pressure on my breasts as he pulled them into his mouth. There were teeth. His fingers changing rhythm, slowing and becoming less fulfilling, teasing again. I murmured his name. The mouth on my nipples was almost painful and his name became a groan as my hips tried to move with the rhythm that he had abandoned.

"Jem," I said as he pulled away from me but his hands never left me and when he slid in close again it was face to face, chest to chest, bodies together. He slid into me with a easy motion that made my heart stop and then race.

He gathered me against him and held still. These moments of stillness were something completely unique to him. Even if I hadn't been completely entranced by him at that moment, I would have given him my full attention as soon as he stilled. We fit. We'd always fit. Not the same but complements. Stronger for being together. This was just the physical expression of that truth.

"I love you so much," he said to me.

"I know, I love you too, James," I said.

He kissed me and it was gentle and achingly sweet as he started to move against me. I settled into him and matched each stroke, each gentle rocking pulse that ran through him and into me. After being pinned against the wall earlier, I would have expected quick and powerful but he took his time. I let him lead, I let him set the speed and the intensity grew.

It built slowly but undeniably. When he rolled onto his back without breaking the embrace, I picked up his slow and steady rhythm. His hands playing over my hips and up my back. Holding my face so he could see my eyes or kiss me.

When he sat up under me, I lost my balance and he had to catch me. His hair was rumpled and fell into his eyes when he looked up at me. I sat in his lap and pushed it back from his face. I had memorized every line of that face when we'd been young but I always seemed to find something new hidden there.

His eyes were mischievous as he dropped me onto my back again. My skin slid over the sheets as he pulled me toward the edge of the bed so that one of my knees hung over the edge, the other he pushed up wide. He slid into me this time with that unshakable self control gone. He leaned over me and the position gave him leverage that might have hurt but never quite did. I didn't realize how close I was until his body came down on mine deeper than I could ever remember him being.

Our lips were together again and the taste of his tongue was in my mouth as my body crested and I gasped out his name, my fingers tightening in his hair. I shuddered against him and around him as he held that too deep thrust in place until my eyes fluttered back open.

"Can I keep going?" he asked and for all the world his voice was shy. My heart expanded or maybe it shattered as I looked into that face.

"Slower?" I said and it came out as a question.

He kept me close as he pulled me back onto the bed and into our first position. My body shuddered around him as he slid back in. I kept my arms wrapped around him and my face buried in his neck as the last shreds of his self control came apart and his body shuddered it's own release against me from the tips of his toes to flutter of his eyelashes against my cheek. I stroked his face as he relaxed against me. He gathered me against his chest so we were snuggled together, nose to nose. Another one of those long, silent moments of stillness followed as our hearts found their own rhythms again.

"I was supposed to do something," I said and my voice was dreamy and too soft.

"Scrabble?" he asked.

"I don't think it was scrabble," I said.

"Do you think if we tell people we can't come to things because we're busy playing scrabble, they'll believe us?" he asked.

"No," I said. "They'll probably assume it's code for something else."

"I like the something else," he said and his lips brushed my cheek.

"Natasha," I said.

"No, not that something else," he said.

"I was supposed to meet her at 4:30," I said. I twisted to see the clock but it was out of my field of vision without getting up and my body wasn't ready to be even that far away from him.

"You're late," he said lifting his head to see the clock behind me.

"Worth it," I murmured and put my forehead against his and we stayed there a little longer before I tore myself away from him.


	7. Christmas Cookies

**AN: I was writing a series of unedited holiday drabbles on tumblr and this one turned out well so I'm adding it to this collection too. **

Christmas Cookies

It was icy and windy and Jem had thought taking the subway back to the apartment in New York in December would be a good idea. His feet were wet and the snow had started melting into his pant legs.

When he got in the apartment door he dropped the mittens and the scarf in a heap on the floor. The cat glared at the snow on the rug and then at the rest of him.

"You're whiter than usual," he said. There was white powder all over Church's head and shoulders. Jem brushed some off and it clung to his damp fingers.

Church meowed and rubbed a generous amount of the stuff onto his pants where it clung. Flour not some ingredient for magic. Which in most households would be a good thing but Tessa was good at magic and she was not good at baking.

The apartment didn't smell like burning. Yet. Jem dropped his soggy jacket with the other things on the floor and made a silent vow to spend the next Christmas someplace warmer and brighter.

He found Tessa in the kitchen with a bowl of goo in front of her and a grimace on her face as she poked it with a spoon.

"What are you making?" He asked crossing the room to stand near her and look down at the concoction which actually smelled delicious which made it an improvement over her attempt at brownies a few months earlier that hadn't smelled of chocolate at all.

"Christmas cookies, you know the ones you cut into shapes and put frosting on?" She said. "You're wet."

"And cold," he said. "They look ok?"

"You're supposed to roll it out flat," she said lifting a spoonful of dough and letting it run off the spoon. "Mine's a little soupy."

"Why cookies?" Jem asked.

"Lucie used to make cookies with her children every year. It always seemed such a nice tradition. They'd cut them into shapes and everyone would mix a different colour of icing and the kids would make a mess of them then insist you try one of every colour," she said with a faraway smile.

"Obviously, Lucie could follow a recipe better than you can," Jem said.

"Shut up," Tessa told him but she was still smiling. She turned and put her hands against his cheeks which were still red from the cold. There was some ingredient smudged on her chin and he rubbed that off with his thumb.

"I caught myself imagining yesterday," she said in a very soft voice. "And I'm not ready to do more than imagine it but I wanted to know," there was a long pause and he let her think it through without interrupting, "I guess I wanted to know if you had ever imagined it."

"Imagined what?" He asked.

"What our children might be like," she said it gently like it was a secret or something she thought might anger him. He went still and then blinked. He hadn't imagined it. Ever. It had never been an option.

"No, I've never imagined it," he told her just as gently as he pulled her a little closer, "but I'd like to."

"They'll have your eyes," she said.

"And curls like this," he played with a piece of her hair. They whispered like they were telling each other secrets. A smile was spreading across his face and he'd forgotten that he was cold and tired, "I could teach them how to play the violin. We could get them those tiny little child violins that come in colours."

"And they'll grow up and become rock guitarists instead," she said.

"I could support that," he said which made her laugh.

That Christmas was a little different from the ones that they had shared before. As they set up the tree, as they walked by the shops, as they attended parties, as they did all the things they'd come to think of as normal they were imagining sharing it with someone else. Someone who hadn't been born yet. They'd stop sometimes and whisper together about what it would be like to bring a child into their very strange little life.

"I think it'd be wonderful," Tessa said when Jem brought it up again months later and asked her what shd thought about doing more than imagining it.

She wasn't a Christmas baby but they'd always think of her as being part of that Christmas nearly two years before she'd been born.


End file.
